After You Left(42)

She wanted to protest as strenuously as he’d declared his love, but his speech had robbed her lungs of air.

‘I’m going to tell her tonight. And then I’m moving out.’

She jumped up from the chair. ‘No! You can’t be serious! Where would you even go?’

This broke his stride slightly. ‘Well . . . anywhere. I’ll get a flat. Or I’ll live with you.’

She sat down beside him again, aware that a part of her was involuntarily withdrawing. ‘Eddy, you’re not being rational.’ She had seen him as a man with values, with a strong moral code. Someone much like herself. Yes, they were doing a deceitful thing, but they weren’t actually hurting anyone. But this – this reckless desire to dump all his responsibilities for love – this would hurt others. And the fact that he wasn’t paying heed to that – it made her think less of him.

He gripped her shoulders and forced her to look at him. ‘Just tell him you’re not going back. You can get your stuff shipped up here. People do it all the time. It’s not impossible.’

She opened her mouth to say something, something to drill some sense into him, but it died in her. He gently shook her. ‘It really just comes down to this, Evelyn: do you love me and want to be with me? Because I believe you do.’

Tears built up. She felt the need to lie, but she couldn’t leave here having lied to him about something this big. ‘I do love you, yes. There is just a rightness when I’m with you, a sense of belonging.’ Now she’d said it, she felt elated, as though saying it was all that was needed to give it the ghost of a chance. And yet there was a concrete weight of impossibility in her heart. ‘In a way, I fully understand what I always suspected. I couldn’t go on that date with you because I knew I’d fall in love – if I hadn’t already. I was torn then, and I didn’t want to be torn, I wasn’t ready for that. But I’m not sure I’m ready for it now, either.’

She could see he was floored by her pragmatism and lack of faith. ‘And you’re wrong in what you say,’ she added. ‘You said it really just comes down to whether I love you and want to be with you. But it doesn’t just come down to that! What would you say to your daughter?’

He looked genuinely mystified. ‘Well, I’d tell her the truth. One day. When she was old enough to understand.’

‘I mean now. What would you tell her now?’ She knew she was putting him under fire and he wasn’t used to it. ‘You see, you haven’t thought it through.’

‘I don’t believe I really need to think that part through! I’m leaving Laura, not April. I would never do anything to harm my little girl. I love her for all the world, and that’s never going to change. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be with you.’

‘You would break her heart. Are you ready to do that? You’re her father. You’re supposed to set the values for her. You’re not setting the values for April if you walk away.’

‘One day she’ll understand,’ he repeated.

‘But she’d always know you didn’t put her first. You put you first.’

There. That was the crux of it. She wanted him to be better than that.

He held her eyes. She could almost see him searching to contradict her, but the truth was pushing back at him, harder. ‘I don’t think that staying with her mother for all the wrong reasons is teaching April anything, is it?’ His voice had mellowed with doubt. ‘She’s not going to be better off being raised by parents who are just tolerating each other, knowing that they should never have been a couple. I should never have got back together with her all those years ago, after you . . .’

‘Eddy! There was no me. It was one day at a wedding. One quite fabulous day that took us completely off guard, yes. But a day. That’s all.’

It hurt her to say it, because it felt untrue, but she had to make him believe it. She had to somehow make him see sense. They weren’t living in a bubble. Their perfect week together was perfect only because they had managed to keep reality at bay. But so many people’s happiness was hanging in the balance.

He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Anyway, I think you’re being remarkably cavalier. It’s easy to say all that, but no five-year-old would ever choose to have her parents split up just because of a concept she couldn’t understand anyway.’

He wiped a hand over his mouth. It was clear that he could fight his corner, but Evelyn was the much stronger opponent. The tension came down a few notches. ‘Do you have a beer?’ he asked. She hesitated, then got him one from the fridge. ‘You know what?’ he said when he’d taken a big gulp. ‘I think it’s you who wouldn’t be able to do it. You’re using my situation as your excuse.’

She sat down again, exhausted from all this intensity. ‘I don’t have a child, Eddy, no. But I have a husband and I love him, even if it’s more about loyalty and affection than passion. It’s still love. I made a commitment to him. Everything can’t all be about my happiness, can it? That’s not how it works when you marry. Mark has never done anything bad to me. I can’t just walk away.’

‘Why not?’

His persistent naivety bothered her. She was starting to see it as a weakness.

‘It’ll break him.’ She doubted that, of course. Mark would survive. But he would be massively changed. Besides, oddly, in all of her fantasising over the last week that she could live a life with Eddy, she had never once considered the prospect of ending a life with Mark. It was suddenly way too much to have to take on board.